Category Archives: Personal News

1110 7D 4007 | Keen young man, Trinidad, Cuba

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 22-11-2010 17:51 | ISO: 100 | Exp. Mode: Aperture priority | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/160s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 85.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

Shot of the day for Monday. Everyone else in the party was shooting over this little fella’s head at the cathedral, but I happened to glance down. Bingo!

1110 7D 3910 | Old Man, Trinidad, Cuba

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 21-11-2010 23:30 | ISO: 400 | Exp. Mode: Program normal | Exp. bias: -1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 85.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

It’s about 50 miles from Cienfuegos to Trinidad, along the coast, which takes over 2 hours on a very bumpy road. However the drive is worth it. Trinidad is a very pretty town: different architecture again – based on two storey terraced houses and cobbled streets, with the houses all painted wonderful pastel colours. The Hotel Cuevas in Trinidad is lovely – a very Caribbean style arrangement of individual chalets at the top of the hill outside the town.

Trinidad is more overtly tourist focused than the other places we’ve been, with almost every other house on a larger street or square turned into a little gallery or coffee bar, and a lot of the more colourful older people very much geared up to “a pose for a peso”. The downside is that the pestering is worse than elsewhere, except maybe around the Capitolio in Havana.

I do now have one cigar, forced on me by an itinerant vendor. I didn’t want the cigar, and he didn’t want a bar of soap in exchange, so honours are even! However, it’s a good prop to go with the hat (see previous post), so I’m now working even harder on my “Che Guevara” persona. You have been warned.

1110 40D 7566 | El Comendante at the top of the tower in Cienfuegos

Camera: Canon EOS 40D | Date: 20-11-2010 20:24 | ISO: 100 | Exp. Mode: Manual control | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 115.0mm

OK, this isn’t very PC, but who cares! Michelle spotted me at the top of the old tower in Cienfuegos and got me to wave. I think this matches the hat.

I am, of course, making a list of people who will be first against the wall when the glorious day comes. You have been warned!

1110 7D 3403 | The Palacio de Valle and Sculpture, Cienfuegos

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 20-11-2010 13:06 | Resolution: 3449 x 5174 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Mode: Aperture priority | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/200s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 17.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

This is the Palacio de Valle, a great piece of architecture inside and out with strong Moorish influences. It’s also home to a restaurant, one of Cienfugos’ finest, where we ate after our long drive from Vinales.

That has to be one of the worst experiences of the trip so far. The food was disgusting, so much so that one member of the party had to send his back, and the entertainment wasn’t much better. The beautiful grand piano was probably last tuned before the revolution, and I suspect the elderly Shirley Bassey look-alike playing it was probably last in tune about the same time!

OK, I was warned about the food before I came, and I haven’t visited anywhere in danger of getting a Michelin star. But elsewhere the music has been superb, with every bar and street corner hosting a band pumping out great latin rhythms, and wonderful complex harmonies. I may yet grow to hate “Juan Palamera” (or what ever it’s called), and the one I only know as the “Golden Wonder, they’re jungle fresh” song (showing my age ), but so far I’m bearing up well. The old biddy at the Palacio was an exception.

1110 7D 3648 v2 | Blue Wall, Cienfuegos

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 20-11-2010 18:54 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Mode: Program normal | Exp. bias: 2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/400s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 15.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

It’s odd what economic anomalies are thrown up by a struggling economy. Before I came to Cuba I was told that I should bring soap as a gift/tip, so I’ve spent months systematically stealing hotel soap. However, the only people interested in soap appear to be older women, and I’m not photographing many of them, so I’ve now started supplying soap to other members of the party. I wonder what the going rate is…?

The kids of Cienfuegos appear to be well-fed, healthy and a pretty cheerful bunch. Yesterday I saw them engaged in a fun run (I didn’t get the picture of the chap on roller skates passing the motorbike cop, damn ), playing chess, rowing, and just generally charging around as kids do on a nice Saturday. And if they do come up to you what do they ask for? Not money, not soap (these are young boys!), but pens and pencils. Yes, these kids want to write and draw, and they don’t have the materials. That’s genuinely sad. If only I’d known, I would have packed a box of Bics. I’m going to try and donate my one biro to a good home today or tomorrow.

1110 7D 3234 | The Teatro Tomas Terry, Cienfuegos

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 19-11-2010 22:43 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Mode: Aperture priority | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/100s | Aperture: 8.0 | Focal Length: 16.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

I’ve found the right collective noun for photographers: it has to be a “diffraction”, because they do have a tendency to spread out from a point. Like setting a group of small dogs loose in a wood full of squirrels…

The drive down from Vinales to Cienfuegos was long, boring and bumpy, not helped by a driver with the bladder of a camel. What is remarkable is how empty central Cuba is: only a very small fraction of the land visible from the motorway is under cultivation. This is in sharp contrast to every other Caribbean island I’ve visited, where almost every available square foot has some productive use, even if it’s only a couple of goats or banana plants. I expected to see mile after mile under sugar cane or similar, but instead you see a lot of scrubland.

Then, suddenly, about 20 miles from the south coast, things change. There’s rich and varied agriculture, and the architecture changes to what I think of as “generic Caribbean”: small square houses with flat or shallow pitched roofs.

Finally, Cienfuegos is different again: there are sprawling suburbs with the 60s blocks beloved of Communist countries, but the town centre and sea-front have a certain elegance, and are at least a little reminiscent of other Victorian sea-side resort towns, albeit without the big seafront hotels and casinos. It may still be poor, but it’s a definite notch up from Havana or Vinales.

Friday’s picture is of the Theatre in the central square. It’s not a misprint, but a very odd coincidence: Tomas Terry was a dodgy posh bloke who built a theatre, and of course Terry Thomas was an actor who played dodgy posh blokes.

After Vinales internet connectivity became more and more of a challenge. The Hotel Jagua in Cienfuegos was elegant and well-equipped, but very poorly stocked and staffed. One of the things they were out of were the tickets for computer use. Then this morning they had no milk at breakfast, and the honey had been watered down, so things weren’t getting any better.

Trinidad has one internet cafe, and about a 1 bit per second connection speed, so although I had several posts queued up, I didn’t get to post them until I was back in Havana, with a proper WiFi connection.

1110 7D 3041-5 Panorama Small | Panorama of Vinales Valley, shot from a hotel veranda at the Hotel Los Jazzmines

Resolution: 5605 x 843

Another shot from yesterday: the view from my hotel balcony at the Hotel Los Jazzmines, a panorama stitched from 5 shots.

Scary fact: the TIF file generated by the stitching software was 148MB. That’s the downside of steadily growing image resolution On the other hand, I’m still workingtowards my first gigapixel panorama

1110 7D 3072 | Mother and child, tobacco farm, Vinales

Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 18-11-2010 15:48 | Resolution: 4854 x 3236 | ISO: 800 | Exp. Mode: Program normal | Exp. bias: -1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/50s | Aperture: 4.5 | Focal Length: 35.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

The update I wrote at about 7am yesterday turned out to be incorrect – the mist in Vinales Valley suddenly cleared, and we got some very good shots in the early morning light, with wisps of mist still visible. I’ll pop one of these in the second post.

After breakfast we visited a tobacco farm. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to see in terms of tobacco processing, because it’s right at the end of the season. However, we did get plenty of chances to shoot the people and the farm itself. I’m particularly proud of my “mother and child” shot. Who says my subscription to National Geographic isn’t paying off?

The people are very friendly, and will put up with endless requests to pose with a smile on their faces. However you do worry that it’s driven by their desperate poverty, and the fact that a 1 Peso tip is getting on for a day’s income for some people here. I can’t imagine telling a Surry farmer to stop what he’s doing for 1/2 hour so 14 people can take photographs, or (as happened to another person on the trip yesterday, admittedly inadvertently) stopping someone driving off in their own car because they were getting in shot!

Yesterday afternoon the weather closed in, so my exhaustive series on the porches of Vinales will have to wait until another year…

7 hour drive to Cienfuegos today. Oh well…